advanced materials
While the right refrigeration system is critical to preserve perishable items and saving supermarkets from losing money in food waste, it also represents a significant portion of a store's energy consumption and maintenance expenses.
The ideal supermarket refrigeration system should be:
That brings us to evaluate CO2, a supposedly “natural” refrigerant that, despite having low GWP, falls short on several other factors that are important to supermarket refrigeration. These include:
Installation
Switching to CO2 refrigeration system can be disruptive and costly. It requires entirely new equipment because CO2 -based refrigeration systems function at high pressures, and as a result, need costly components that must withstand high pressure conditions.
Excess Leaks
When a leak occurs in a CO2 refrigeration system, it is very rapid due to the high pressures of CO2 . Furthermore, there is no recovery equipment for CO2, meaning repairs often lead to complete system discharge.
Maintenance
Unlike HFO-based systems, CO2-based refrigeration systems are complex and difficult to repair, and demand specialized skills and capabilities. This makes finding qualified technicians a real challenge. There are also concerns regarding whether a refrigeration system running at such a high pressure will have as long a lifespan as a traditional system.
Sporadic Supply
CO2 refrigerant has significant short-term supply and pricing challenges. As the fossil fuel-based economy winds down, it is anticipated that less CO2 will be available as a byproduct of these industrial processes, thus creating the need to produce CO2 refrigerant “on purpose.” This will impact the supply and significantly drive up the production cost of refrigerant-grade CO2 .
Energy Efficiency
More than 95% of a typical supermarket’s lifetime greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are generated through the system's energy consumption (scope 2 emissions), according to a lifecycle comparison of CO2 refrigerants versus low GWP HFO-based refrigerants. Meanwhile, the emissions from refrigerant leaks (scope 1 emissions) have a significantly lower contribution of less than 5%.1 Because commercial refrigeration CO2 systems are less thermodynamically efficient, they consume 20% more energy than HFO-based systems, which dominate the overall lifecycle GHG impact.
Reliability
Stores using higher-pressure CO2-based systems must take precautions to ensure they can survive a power outage. During a power outage, refrigeration systems warm to ambient conditions. This requires a backup generator and an HFO/HFC refrigeration unit or an entire system's worth of CO2 refrigerant onsite. In case of delay in managing the leak, the entire system may be down for extended periods, resulting in a loss of food safety and/or quality.
It's time to reassess CO2-based systems and consider a transition to low GWP refrigerants such as Solstice® HFO and HFO blends.
Being a sustainable supermarket is now easier with Solstice® HFO-based refrigerants for low-and-medium temperature applications
Choose Solstice® Refrigerants for your supermarket instead of CO2 and start your journey to a lower carbon future
Customer Success Stories
Be a part of our transition to a low-carbon future program
This program is exclusively crafted for supermarkets interested in testing any of our A2L refrigerants—Solstice® L40X, Solstice® 454C, or Solstice® 454A—in their new equipment. Once you sign up for this program, our team will evaluate your installation, and if it's suitable for the trial, our experts will collaborate with you to help you achieve your supermarket’s sustainability goals.
1Based on Honeywell eco-efficiency simulation for 20 year period
2Technology Options for Low Environmental Impact Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Systems, ORNL/TM- 2023/3041, Pub200582.pdf (ornl.gov